Emily’s guide to barely surviving backpacking

While I’m off enjoying a road trip to New Orleans my good friend Emily from the Myfatego blog volunteered a guest post for me. Thank you Emily and enjoy!

My pap, jack of all trades, says sometimes you only know enough to get yourself hurt. A few years ago, on my first backpacking trip, I knew enough to nearly kill myself.
I’ve been camping as long as I can remember. My mom is a real enthusiast. Camping meant tents and sleeping bags; no air mattress for us, we were too extreme. No electricity either, so you can leave the portable television at home. It was just us, nature, a deck of cards, and a cooler for the hot dogs and S’mores chocolate. Now that I have a few slightly more primitive campouts under my belt, I realize camping with my mom was not so rustic as I once imagined. Don’t get me wrong; we weren’t in the back yard. We were at campgrounds though. There were usually sites with picnic tables and a fire ring, and down a ways would be potable water and a shower house. Back then I would carry my cosmetic bag up to the showers and stop to shake my head condescendingly at the people in the R.V.’s. That is not real camping, I would think smugly. I am a real camper. Oh sweet naive baby Emily.
Flash forward a decade or so to 22 year old Emily. At the time I had recently had a baby, and I was fat. I was really fat. Probably around 240 pounds. One day as I was wallowing around the house, probably covered in spit up and cookie crumbs, I happened to stumble across an advertisement for an organization called fat-packing. Basically they take a bunch of big boys and girls on a long hike, and when they come out of the woods BOOM! They’re skinny. This was very intriguing to me. I’d been tossing around the idea of a backpacking trip for awhile. I didn’t have the billion dollars it cost to go on their full-service fat-camp style trip, but who needed them? I didn’t want the watered down champagne safari. I wanted the legit experience. I’m a real camper after all. Dammit.
I wrangled my best friend Teresa into coming with me. She’d never been in the wild before (neither had I), but she was willing. So begins my comedy of errors. I did what I considered to be enough research. I chose the location and called the ranger to make sure they were open and the back country camping was free-yup! We were going to Savage Gulf in South TN. Sounds like a friendly place, right? Next I looked up what we should bring and made my list: clothes, food, water purifier…then I got bored, and I decided I already knew what I needed.
My first serious mistake was my choice of water purification. Savage Gulf has natural running water sources at different points along the trail. Some of these points are over 5 miles away from one another. I brought one 32 oz water bottle with me, and because obviously I needed to clean the water somehow, the bottle I brought was a bobble. For those of you who don’t know, the bobble’s mouthpiece is a built in water filter. Basically it is the equivalent to pouring lake water into a Brita pitcher. Had we ever made it to the first water source on the hike, I’m sure we both would have gotten ecoli and died.
My second biggest mistake was my choice of food. I had started Atkins before the trip, and I really wanted to watch my carb intake. Hiking all day, and eating little to no carbohydrates? Lord. I did pack about 8 cans of meat, half a dozen Atkins bars, a jar of peanut butter, a box of precooked bacon, and then another half dozen cans of black beans and veggies. The food alone weighed a ton. It was so stupidly heavy I couldn’t even tie it up in a tree because I was too weak to hoist it up there. I walked about 10 yards from camp and “hid” it under some foliage. Of course, by that point I was hoping a bear would come and eat me.
My back pack itself was a disaster. It weighed about 60 pounds. I had a full size tent hanging off of it by a carabineer, and I had in general packed a lot of non-necessities. Besides my collection of canned goods, I had a queen sized pillow, multiple changes of clothes, 2 books for pleasure reading, a notebook for journaling, and of course a deck of cards. This was on top of all the stuff you actually need to camp. However, that wasn’t even the worst part. The backpack I was using was a really high quality bag I had borrowed without permission from my mom. Unbeknownst to me, she had separated the bag from the support frame. I didn’t even know the bag had a support frame that went with it! I was carrying 60 pounds of poorly distributed weight right against my spine. Imagine tying sacks of potatoes to your arms, slinging them over your shoulder, and then climbing up the stairs of the Eiffel Tower.
Did I have the right shoes? No. Socks? No. Bug spray? No. I had not planned on how I would dispose of our trash or do dishes since I had never been at a place that didn’t offer amenities like rubbish bins and water pumps. I did have an iPod, Thank God. If I turned it up loud enough I could drown out the sound of my friend’s complaining. Bless her heart though; she did have it worse than me.
10 minutes into the trip, before we even knew what we were in for, she twisted her ankle. By the time we laid down to sleep, she had manifested pink eye. Not to mention she signed up for this trip with my reassurance that she was in the safe hands of an true outdoors(wo)man.
We had planned to hike a 32 mile loop in 4 days. Instead we hiked 5 excruciating miles in, camped, and walked 5 painstaking miles back out. We were dehydrated, sore, and ready to kill each other. I vowed never to camp again. I hate camping.
After we drove home, I went straight to bed. The next morning I went ahead and checked on my weight. BOOM! I had lost 5 lbs. I had lost 5 lbs in 2 days. I LOVE camping.
My pap, a terribly sage man, also says you learn more from your failures than from your successes. It took me nearly a year before I was willing to take on another backpacking trip, but I was so much more ready for it. I have two pieces of advice. First, research everything you can before you go. Read books, read the survival punk blog, talk to people who have hiked the area you’re going to, make friends with the park ranger, watch the movie Without a Paddle. Knowledge is power. Second, invest in some good gear. The right shoes can make a world of difference. The wrong water bottle could kill you. Be a good boy (or girl) scout and be prepared.